ancestry
Family history research can be challenging for African-Americans due to the long history of slavery in the United States and a lack of documentation about those who were enslaved.
To enable more family history discoveries, Ancestry has continued to add new record collections so every story can be told. This includes making 3.5 million Freedmen’s Bureau records fully digitized, searchable and available for free.
The Freedmen’s Bureau was created after the Civil War to provide aid to the formerly enslaved and was likely the first time newly freed African-Americans appeared in records after emancipation. Offering a path to trace records before 1870 can be instrumental in helping descendants of previously enslaved people discover more about their families. While ancestors’ stories may have gotten lost as they were passed down for generations, discovering family stories is possible using Ancestry records.
For over 170 years, the public has looked to The New York Times for truth about the modern world, so the alignment was natural. To put the full scope of Ancestry’s unmatched collection of more than 30 billion records to work in service of these questions, Ancestry and T Brand Studio collaborated to create Records of Resilience. The video series explored the family histories of Black Americans across five documentary featurettes. Records of Resilience was promoted as a paid post within The New York Times newsroom’s “Black History, Continued” series, which explores pivotal moments and transformative figures in Black history.
Each video, directed by Travis Wood, featured people unearthing records from Ancestry about their ancestors for the first time.
T Brand Studio captured the powerful moments when each individual learned foundational information about their history. Notable historians spoke with subjects to help them add vivid context to their discoveries. These stories resonated with The Times’s audience, with video engagement surpassing internal benchmarks. And the videos led to public discussion, with features in Adweek and The Drum. Not only did Records of Resilience showcase the depth of the information available on Ancestry, the videos let the world see real people discover and process those life-changing lessons from the past.